Eva barely made it three blocks before Kevin's van rolled up. The side door slid open just long enough for her to leap inside, then snapped shut as they sped off through Georgetown, blending in with all the other delivery vans crowding the streets.
Kevin glanced at the monitors, watching the townhouse erupt in chaos. Guests poured out onto the sidewalk while security rattled away into radios. A black SUV peeled from the curb—Whitfield visible in the back, phone pressed to his ear.
"That went well," Kevin muttered.
Eva yanked out her diamond earpiece, catching her breath. "He didn't even try to deny it. Just told me I had no idea what I'd unleashed. Twice."
Kevin's face tightened. That particular stillness—the one she'd seen before when he was doing calculations faster than words—settled in. "That isn't a denial," he said. "That's a warning."
They left the flashing lights behind, merging onto the parkway. Eva kicked off her heels, tucked the sidearm back into her holster, finally let herself exhale.
"So what did we actually unleash?" she asked.
Kevin didn't answer right away. He shifted to a different feed. This wasn't the townhouse anymore. He brought up a live tracker—three dots moving around the East Coast.
"I embedded something else in the files I sent," he said. "Not just financial records. I slipped in a beacon. If certain people downloaded and opened it—people whose devices were flagged in my father's old systems—it sent their location to me."
"Thought this was about exposing Whitfield."
"It was. And it still is." Kevin's jaw set. "I figured Whitfield answered to somebody. Didn't expect three somebodies to open that file within four minutes after it hit two hundred inboxes." He rotated the monitor toward her. Three blinking red dots—one in McLean, Virginia. Another in Geneva. The last one, unreal, on a private vessel in the middle of the Atlantic.
"Who are they?" Eva asked.
He shook his head. "No clue. Devices are encrypted beyond anything I've cracked before—military grade, not corporate. Whoever they are, they're not investors or lobbyists. They're… something else." His voice dropped, the calm that always meant underlying fear. "Eva, I think tonight wasn't just about laundering schemes. I think we knocked on a door that runs far deeper than Eleanor, Whitfield, or even my father."
She stared at the three red dots, that old vertigo creeping in—the feeling you get when the plan suddenly sprawls past anything you prepped for. Like standing on a rooftop edge, the ground shifting, farther away and somehow unavoidable.
"How deep does it go?" she whispered.
Kevin looked back at her. "I don't know. My father built a bunker—something hidden, just in case someone came looking. And he wasn't paranoid about Eleanor or Whitfield. You don't spend thirty years building a secret server farm to protect yourself from a stepmother and a senator." For the first time since Tangier, she saw something in him that wasn't calculation or grief or lust. He was genuinely uneasy. "I think he was afraid of whoever's on that boat."
Silence fell. Only the steady hum of tires and the tracker's quiet ping, three dots still and waiting—as if those people paused, the instant they realized they'd been spotted.
Then all three dots vanished at once.
Kevin leaned in fast. "That's not just a signal drop. That's an active kill switch. Someone figured out we're watching."
Eva felt cold clarity wash over her, the kind that steadies you for a forty-foot fall—the moment fear stops being fear and becomes just raw information.
"Well," she said quietly, "sounds like we're not the only ghosts in this story."
Kevin glanced at her, then back to the blank screen where three phantom dots lingered in memory.
"No," he said, "and I don't think we just became the hunters tonight. I think we just told something older than Eleanor, older than my father, exactly where we are."
Outside, the van's headlights carved white across the interstate sign—and somewhere beyond, three phones gone dark were already being handed to men who didn't answer to senators, CEOs, or governments. Not at all.